


möbius strip

by everytuesday



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Quentin Coldwater Lives, Relationship Study, S4 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20233882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everytuesday/pseuds/everytuesday
Summary: She’s always been there. Somehow. It’s hard to know where one story ends and the other begins. Jane and Quentin. A stable time loop, an inevitability, two souls tied up together in the same story.He barely knows her, but at the same time he knows all about her, and she knows all about every version of him.





	möbius strip

**Author's Note:**

> tw for pretty frank introspection into quentin's mental space during the finale. he didn't die, but his suicidal ideation is addressed.

The first time Jane Chatwin meets Quentin Coldwater, she’s fifteen with her foot caught in a trap. He’s a fool attempting to help her alongside a very pretty witch and she forgets him soon after (though the pretty witch stays in her mind far longer).

The second time, she is sixteen and equal parts terrified and hopeful. He is seventy-six and so very, very tired, but he speaks softly and kindly and hands her the key even though she can see in his eyes that it means everything to him. So she kisses him on the cheek, thanks him, and runs on her way. She never forgets him, though it will be many years before she realizes who he is.

The third time Jane meets Quentin, she doesn’t recognize him as the old man who gave her the key to start her on her quest. Instead, she knows him as the student who died five times already because he keeps putting himself in close proximity to her careful selection of Brakebills students and leaping into danger to help them. She finally takes him aside, posing as a member of the faculty to try to get to know him. He’s smart, but no genius. Can do magic, but nothing special. He desperately wants to belong.

Put simply, he isn’t very remarkable.

She tries to push him out of the story, because his death generally ruins Julia for the rest of the timeline and Julia is a vital piece in all her plans. But Quentin winds up back in the thick of it anyway. Even the timeline he’s out of Brakebills altogether, he’s consulted as a Julia’s Fillory expert friend who knows even more of the books than she does. He promptly gets himself killed by not knowing enough to defend himself. She’s not prone to guilt over failed timelines, but the haunted look in Julia’s eyes as she describes the brutality of Quentin’s death is one of those moments that stays with her.

She gives up trying to keep him out. Destiny is bullshit, her own life has convinced her of that, but perhaps there are universal constants. And Quentin Coldwater’s unwavering persistence is one of them.

\---

The first time Quentin Coldwater meets Jane Chatwin, they are both twelve years old. He’s a shy middle schooler and she’s a fictional character in his new favorite book series. He desperately wishes she was real, but eventually decides the world is too awful for Jane to exist. He settles for wishing he was fictional alongside her, that he could somehow fall into the pages and join her on her adventures rather than attend third period.

The second time Quentin meets Jane, she’s a paramedic named Eliza. And then she’s a specialist sent to rob him of his memories. And then she’s dead. And then she’s the Watcher Woman. And on and on it goes, Quentin meeting Jane in every corner of his life until she finally stops being there.

He thinks of the young Jane he met at the end of his story (at least one version of his story). As an old man, handing off the key to the girl who’d change his life. Their stories are so intrinsically connected now and it’s an impossible feeling to know the person who was so important to him as a child was also somehow relying on him. He feels --maybe it’s a bit of a vain thought, though wouldn’t be the first time -- that he’s part of her legacy. He’s alive because of her. She worked so hard to make sure things would fall into place for him. And now, after everything, he thinks he’s maybe let her down. It’s quite painful so he tries not to dwell for too long on it, though it’s always there in the back of his mind. Jane gave him 40 versions of reality to find one where he could live and then after all that he had almost--

But he _ hadn’t_.

He hadn’t.

But he almost did.

And now he feels a step out of place. He doesn’t have anywhere to be and that means he can be anywhere he wants, but that involves deciding for himself, and he hasn’t made a decision purely about his own life in years. It’s been about stopping that monster or killing this god or saving that person. Now there are no quests with his name stamped onto them in big black letters courtesy of Jane and he doesn’t know how to choose.

For the first few months, he tries to stay in the penthouse because it feels like a non-decision. He’s already been living there. Nothing has to change. It’s also free rent and he and Kady are friendly enough that he doesn’t feel like his presence is a burden. Her work with the hedges in New York sort of fascinates him, as much as anything can fascinate him at this stage in his mental health, which is not very much.

Feeling things is hard, right now.

It’s just motions. Get up (for real, get up Coldwater). Make your bed. Take a shower. Pour cereal. Eat the cereal. He gets stuck on that part a lot and sometimes just stares into the full bowl of cereal until it gets mushy and then dumps it down the drain without ever getting a bite into his mouth. Kady usually has breakfast with him and he’s sure she notices, but she never asks him about it. She doesn’t usually talk to him about anything, so when the pace changes, it’s strange, but he’s up for it in theory.

“What are you doing here, Quentin?” Kady asks one morning, dropping down into a seat at the island next to him with her bowl.

“I’m not doing anything,” Quentin says. “That’s sort of the point.”

“You ever think about going hedge?” she asks around a mouthful of cereal. “This is technically a safe house. You saw what getting rejected from Brakebills did to Julia; you could help a lot of people looking for magic. We’re both dropouts. We have knowledge the average hedge doesn’t. I mean, obviously I’m way more badass than you, but...”

She grins and bumps shoulders with Quentin and it feels forced. Kady’s a great liar when she wants, but it doesn’t seem like she wants to pull anything off right now.

“Did you Julia put you up to this?” he asks.

“No,” Kady says, then bites her lip and admits, “It was Alice. She told me I couldn’t just let you sulk and take advantage of the free rent.”

Quentin feels a flash of anger toward Alice and latches onto it, imagining her off in her Library tower, high and mighty, pitying Quentin from afar.

That’s not right. And he knows it. She’s not the kind to pity and he’s being unfair. If Alice asked Kady for favors to get Quentin out of his -- _emotional coma_, Quentin thinks is the phrase he overheard Julia say when she thought he couldn’t hear -- then it was because she cared about him and was trying to help.

He’s still annoyed though.

“Just because Alice suggested it, doesn’t mean it’s not a genuinely good idea,” Kady says. “She’s smart. And I actually do think you could help people, if you’re up for it.”

The point of staying in the apartment was to avoid making a decision on anything. He politely declines Kady’s offer and tells her he’ll pack up his things. She tries to stop him and says he can keep living here, but he knows his time is up and he has to find another place to exist in for awhile.

Julia and Penny-23 are off creating new worlds or otherwise exploring her goddesshood, whatever any of that means, so running away to Julia is off the table.

He sets up a meeting with Fogg to discuss re-enrolling, but the second he steps on campus he hears whispers about how he’s one of the kids that went off to Fillory and did weird shit and allegedly got magic taken away that one time. There are eyes on him the entire path to the dean’s office and he ducks his head, wishes his hair was longer (fuck you, Brian) so he could hide behind it.

He reads over the class listings Fogg offers him, then stares up at him blankly. “I robbed a bank, killed a god, and trapped an eldritch abomination in a mirror world. Do I really need to attend,” he scans over the list, “‘History of Summonings’? I summoned the Beast my first month here.”

“And it went so well,” Fogg deadpans.

“Sorry. But, um, no, I just mean-- Aren’t I past this?”

“The point of classes is to build fundamentals you can lean on as you branch out into more complicated forms of magic. You skipped the fundamentals and you’ve picked up some truly terrible casting shortcuts. Your form is awful and your grasp of several languages leaves much to be desired. It’s gotten you by this long but I suspect if you were fully trained some things might have been easier.”

“So I have to take everything?”

“No,” Fogg says. “Credit where credit is due; you’ve had some rather intense… we’ll call them extracurricular projects. We can meet here over the summer break to evaluate your actual skillset and figure out what class requirements we can fast-track you through. Julia told me your discipline was Repair of Small Objects? That can be a starting place.”

“It’s the first week of spring semester,” Quentin says. “That’s-- so far away.”

“Yes, I know. In the meantime, not that you’ve ever asked permission, but you’re welcome to use the facilities here and stay in the cottage. We’ll meet again in June.”

Quentin goes to the cottage, takes one look at the stairs, and then promptly walks through the clock into Fillory.

“The fuck-- are you doing here, Coldwater? -- I thought you-- joined the hedges,” Margo’s voice carries across the room toward him, in short gasps. He turns and sees--

Josh.

And Margo is--?

_ Oh. _

Margo is fucking Josh in the throne room. Because of course she is.

“I think I’m just gonna--” Quentin claps a hand over his eyes and starts to feel his way to the exit. 

His hand brushes up against someone and he hears a sharp intake of breath. He drops his hand from his eyes and--

Eliot. Dressed in deep blue and gold, regal and very Eliot but also--

“Quentin!” Eliot’s face lights up and Quentin flinches back _ hard_, which makes Eliot flinch, and Quentin hates himself for it.

“Sorry, I-- Um--” he can’t meet Eliot’s eyes.

Josh and Margo are still going at it behind him, if their heavy breathing is any indication, and Eliot’s gaze flicks on them for a moment before he steps back toward the door. Quentin shuffles after him, trying to ignore Margo and Josh’s moans.

Eliot closes the throne room and the two stand on opposite sides of the hallway, leaning against the walls. Quentin puts his hands in his pockets, then decides it’s too awkward and folds them across his chest.

“I thought you were with Kady,” Eliot says.

“I was. She wanted a commitment and I couldn’t--”

Eliot’s eyes widen and Quentin realizes he sounds like--

“To the hedges!” he clarifies. “Just to the hedges. But I don’t want to make a decision about anything right now so I came here because…” he holds his hands up in an exaggerated shrug. “Fillory is the ultimate escape.”

Was an escape, once. Now? Fuck Fillory. Quentin almost regrets coming back, especially now that he's realizing being around Eliot is going to be impossible without thinking about the Monster. Even he's trying to exposure therapy his way back into handling being around Eliot, it's probably not going to be very helpful to Eliot's recovery from being possessed if Quentin's flinching at him every ten minutes.

Fuck the Monster, too.

“We always have a use for a super nerd here. Zero commitments required,” Eliot says. “And I’ve missed you.”

Eliot ends every sentence since the Monster left like he’s preparing to deliver a speech and Quentin has no idea what he’s been trying to say, but very much doubts it’s anything he’s emotionally prepared to hear.

Seriously, _ fuck _the Monster.

“How long has it been over here?” Quentin asks.

“Four months, give or take. What about earth?”

“Four months.”

“Huh.”

They stand in the hall, awkwardness palpable in the air.

“Um, I--” Quentin starts.

At the same time Eliot says, “So…”

They mumble at each other a few more times before Quentin ducks his head and asks if he can have his old room back, and no, he doesn’t need Eliot to show him the way there, he can find it on his own.

He literally cannot live in Whitespire, he realizes, on day two when he spots Eliot walking down the hall and flings himself behind a pillar to avoid him. He leaves a note, tells them he’ll be back eventually, and sets off into Fillory. As he starts to pick out his path, he realizes exactly where he wants to go.

He feels the energy around him shift and bend as he steps into the time bubble of the Clock Barrens. It takes him a moment to recover, but when he does, he sees her. Black cloak and dress, hair up in a bun, looking serene as she snips at her plants.

_ Jane_.

She turns, unsurprised by Quentin’s presence, and strolls toward him, “I was wondering when you’d finally turn up here.”

He tries to find anything to say, but he can’t. She gets close and tilts her head at him, kind eyes and wry smile, and Quentin sort of springs himself on her without meaning to. Wraps both arms around her and presses his face against her shoulder and can’t believe he’s getting to see her again, even if it’s a version of her outside of time that can’t--

Her arms slide up around him and she’s holding him, he realizes, humming softly and petting his hair. Have they ever spent time together, really? Their conversations were always so short but--

But she’s always been there. Somehow. It’s hard to know where one story ends and the other begins. Jane and Quentin. A stable time loop, an inevitability, two souls tied up together in the same story.

He barely knows her, but at the same time he knows all about her, and she knows all about every version of him.

“What brings you here?” she pulls away slowly, brushing back his hair and tilting his chin up. “What’s wrong, Quentin?”

“I, um, everything. It’s all wrong, it’s--” he can’t hold back the tears any longer.

He stands there, breaking down in front of her, finally letting it all out. She tugs on his arm and pulls him a few steps further into the garden and it gets bigger. Somehow. The magical perimeter around them stretches ever outward and as it moves, there’s more garden appearing around them until he can’t see where it ends anymore. It’s not just a circle of ticking bushes, but trees and flowers and a stream trickling somewhere in the distance.

She guides him over to bench set into the base of a tree trunk and looks at him.

He tells her everything. Catches her up on how the Beast ended up, Alice-the-Niffin, Ember and Umber, the loss of magic and the key quest to get it back, the mosaic, the Library, the Monster.

The mirror realm. 

“I almost-- did something I couldn’t take back,” Quentin says, carefully. Trying to explain.

How close he’d come to-- just-- losing himself altogether.

“I don’t feel like a fucking person anymore,” Quentin rubs at his eyes, pressing his lips together, breathing in deep through his nose to try to keep himself from full-on sobbing. “I spent six months with a monster that had the face of someone I lo-- It was in his body. And I compartmentalized and I shut it all down to just get through and now it’s over and I don’t know how to--”

Jane’s got a knowing look in her eye and it hits him for the first time in awhile that Martin had been her younger brother, had been someone she loved. He’s known it, of course, but he’s never put the emotions there: She’d spend 39 timelines trying to kill her own brother.

“I almost checked myself into a hospital,” Quentin admits out loud for the first time. It’d been a quiet few hours of research back at the apartment, and then he’d deleted his history and wiped the whole computer with magic for good measure. “But there’s no support group for people who’ve had a monster possess their alternate-timeline partner of fifty years. And there aren’t-- There are magician shrinks, but not for _ that_.”

He wants meds and a nap and ten hour therapy sessions and clear answers on how to get better and he also wants to stop existing for five seconds and he also wants to die, he really does, even with everything fixed. They’ve all moved on and he can’t, he’s still stuck in these-- these moments-- that should be long gone. Alice’s death. Alice-the-Niffin’s shrieking at him. The Monster telling him Eliot was dead. The Monster’s hand around his throat. The Monster’s constant touches. The moment he set off that spell in the mirror realm and almost didn’t move, would have let himself get caught up in the explosion if not for Alice and Penny.

“I can’t grab onto anything. It’s-- I don’t know what to do. I can’t fix it, I just feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Stay here,” she says.

Quentin didn’t realize that was an option.

“Take a break, for however long you need. We’re outside of time, you can go back to whenever you’d like.”

“What do you do here?”

“Well, I _ am _ the Watcherwoman,” she smiles. “I watch. Everything, all at once. Time passes and no time passes. You don’t have to be part of anything. There’s the whole garden to explore, if you want. It takes time to work your way all around it and there’s nothing but time here. And no time here. It’s very confusing but I’ve come to find it rather relaxing.”

“Okay,” Quentin says and it’s the only attempt at a decision that’s come anything close to feeling right.

“Here,” she picks up her basket, filled with plant trimmings, and hands it off to him. “I’ve got this whole row of hedges to finish pruning, why don't you help me finish? And then we can look at the garden and see if there's any tomatoes growing yet. We don’t _ need _to eat, because there’s no time here, but it is fun sometimes. Can you cook?”

Quentin shakes his head.

“Neither can I,” she laughs. “Didn’t need to when I was running around as a Queen of Fillory. There was always a badger or something more than happy to cook meals for me.”

Quentin laughs too, somehow, but it’s not about cooking.

Existing outside of reality. It sounds impossible and a little insane, but it’s Fillory and there’s actual magic so why can’t he have this one thing? Why can’t Jane Chatwin save him one last time?

He feels the weave of the basket on his fingertips, takes Jane’s hand with his other, and follows her into the grove.

**Author's Note:**

> if they had to write quentin coldwater off they could've given him the fantasy of every mentally ill person and just let him run away with with his favorite fictional character to exist out of time for a hot minute.  
thanks for coming to my ted talk.


End file.
